Campbell County GOP pushes back against Trump-endorsed national party platform

The Campbell County GOP Committee this week became one of the first party units statewide to publicly question language relating to a number of issues that the Republican National Committee formally adopted as part of its 2024 party platform Monday — including the removal of a national abortion ban from the platform for the first time in 40 years.

According to a resolution that the county’s unit endorsed later that evening, the RNC “eliminated its historical strong pro-life stance, that life begins at conception and that the Constitution should be amended to ensure protection for all unborn Americans.”

The national platform further put an end to its former “stance on marriage, that marriage is between one biological man and one biological woman … and weakens its pro-gun stance, that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” the resolution said.

By eliminating or weakening these three key issues, the RNC “fails to acknowledge the law of nature and of nature’s God by seeking to protect the value of life, recognizing the sanctity of marriage, and upholding the God-given right of self-defense.”

At its four-day national convention in Milwaukee, the RNC formally abandoned its position explicitly advocating for federal abortion limits in favor of leaving the issue to be decided by the states, which is in line with the position held by former President Donald Trump, who was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate earlier this week.

The national platform says that after 51 years, “that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people.” Moving forward, Republicans “will oppose late term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”

The section on abortion also states that the GOP “believes” that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution “guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights” — a change from the GOP’s 2016 platform, which supported legislation that would have imposed a 20-week federal abortion ban and which Trump ran on that year and in 2020.

And the Republicans’ new official stance on abortion is not even included as part of the platform’s 20 principles that are prioritized first in the language. The first two of those principals call to “seal the border” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” followed by “end inflation, and make America affordable again.”

Defining marriage as only between one man and one woman — a bedrock of the GOP platform for decades — is notably absent.

The platform also mentions the protection of Second Amendment rights just briefly under the seventh of 20 promises “that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican Majorities in the House and Senate.” The platform merely states that Republicans will “defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.”

In comparison, the 2016 party platform , which condemned Democrats for proposing laws that would “eviscerate the Second Amendment,” devoted three paragraphs to gun rights. Four years later, when Trump ran for reelection, the party did not formally adopt a platform at all.

In their resolution, Campbell County Republicans call on the Virginia Republican Party “to ensure that the state party plan officially recognizes that life begins at conception, marriage is between one biological man and one biological woman, and that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

David Richards, a political science professor at the University of Lynchburg, said that the RNC’s 2024 party platform is a sign that Trump has moved on from the primary battles to the heart of the election season by trying to put forward a more moderate platform.

“This is often what happens after a nomination when you have to leave the confines of the party and appeal to the broader electorate. The moderation of positions is a pretty clear attempt to bring in those voters in the middle that might be turned off by a more far right platform,” Richards said.

“The obvious trouble with this approach is that party faithful, who might be further to the extremes, find a moderate platform to be problematic, and that’s what we’re seeing with this resolution. Elections are not won by the extremes of either party, but by those middle voters, who often want more moderate positions.”

Rick Buchanan, the chairman of 5th Congressional District GOP Committee, said that to his knowledge, the resolution from Campbell County Republicans is the first of its kind in the district.

“I don’t disagree with it,” Buchanan said Wednesday. “It appears to be that President Trump has decided to get himself more into the establishment side of the Republican Party, at least that’s what it looks like to me.”

Buchanan added that because of the RNC’s move, he was happy that Trump chose as his running mate JD Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio who opposes abortion rights, even in the case of incest or rape.

“I haven’t talked to anyone else about it, but I hope more like this will come out,” Buchanan said, referring to the county’s resolution.

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